


All You Have Is Your Fire

by HawthorneWhisperer



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, F/M, lots and lots of angst, mentions of torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-08
Updated: 2015-06-08
Packaged: 2018-04-03 11:58:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,402
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4100140
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HawthorneWhisperer/pseuds/HawthorneWhisperer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bellamy didn't think he could survive Mount Weather.  But he did, and somehow the aftermath is almost worse.</p>
            </blockquote>





	All You Have Is Your Fire

**Author's Note:**

> Madgesundersee requested tortured!Bellamy returning from Mount Weather and being haunted by his experiences. Please don’t punch me in the face after reading this. Written after 2x09, before 2x10.

They didn’t seem to understand how hard it was for Bellamy.  _You need your rest, you’ve been through a trauma, you need to stay here until you’ve recovered_  the doctors told him, but they didn’t know what it had been like.

They didn’t understand that he had spent weeks— _weeks_ –being caged and strung up. Mount Weather tried to bleed him dry and almost succeeded, and now the well-meaning doctors of the Ark were doing the same. They didn’t know it—they were helping, they thought—but to Bellamy it was two sides of the same coin.

 _Freedom_. That was what he was longing for those dark, lost hours inside the mountain. Freedom. Air. A throaty laugh that he hadn’t heard often enough before he left and thought he would never hear again. The ability to choose his own path—something that had been stolen from him over and over again. First his mother had Octavia, and while Bellamy couldn’t hate his sister he did resent her for stealing his freedom. Bellamy could no longer be the popular boy in class, the one who cheerfully helped others with their homework and was always picked first in sports. He couldn’t make friends who would eventually ask to come to their compartment, so he shut them out. He snarled at old friends until they backed away like he was a rabid dog and it hurt, but the pain was better than being an orphan.

When he became a guard and he thought he would be able to take control for once, that he could make a difference for Octavia and give her a glimpse of the world beyond the cramped four walls that had always caged her, but that fell apart so spectacularly he could hardly believe it.  _That’s what you get for trying_ , his brain hissed as he picked up garbage and people walked past him as though he was a ghost. He was an orphan and it was his fault and his fault alone, just like Octavia was in prison because of him. The Ark was nothing more than his coffin.

He didn’t even get to decide to die by his sister’s side—Shumway made that decision, shoving a gun in his hand and giving him no choice. So Bellamy became a murderer and left to die on the ground because it was only fitting that even his death would be someone else’s call.

But then things changed—Earth. Sky. Rain.  _Freedom_  and  _whatever the hell we want_. He should have known that it couldn’t last. At first it was  _her_  that seemed like his biggest obstacle, but then the earth shifted around him and the ground was the sky and the sky was beneath him and  _princess_  went from something he hissed to something that sounded like a caress.

And then the world exploded into fire and spears and pain and fear, and the Ark—the people who took his family, who sent him to die, who condemned his sister for living—fell from the sky to tell Bellamy that once again, he was foolish to believe he could control his own destiny. But like a lovesick knight in those stories he read to Octavia on nights her fears seemed to take physical shape, he held fast to the belief that Clarke would never betray him.  _I don’t take orders from you_ , he barked, and the way she looked at him—vulnerable and weak in a way his princess never let show to anyone but him—and said  _I can’t lose you too_  sank to the marrow of his bones. He would let her give him orders because they weren’t orders anymore, they were pleas. This time, he would let her tell him what to do because when you surrender something freely it’s not the same as losing.

Bellamy gave in to her and then her eyes grew cold and like everyone else—like every time—she turned up her nose at him.  _I was being weak_. Four words and once again Bellamy was the idiot for thinking that this time, it was different.

He felt the loss keenly. Lincoln’s betrayal barely even registered because of course Bellamy’s life was worth less than a syringe of red fluid to him. Even Bellamy couldn’t argue with that—he wasn’t even worth anything to Clarke, the one person beside Octavia he thought might give a damn. But he felt the loss all the same as he hung upside down, his vision flickering between red and black as they took everything he had left to give. Mount Weather chained him and beat him bloody, but every time he closed his eyes he saw her instead.

Clarke, terrified and dangling over a pit of spikes, only his hand saving her from death. Clarke, humming a lullaby as she slit Atom’s throat, shoving her fear down so deep it disappeared.  _I need you_ and  _you’re forgiven_ , let out like a sigh in a dark, empty forest, like those two phrases weren’t things he had waited his whole life to hear. The quirk of her lips when she was fighting a smile, her unfailing belief that he would protect her, the way she killed the boy she loved to save him pain and bring her people peace, even though it broke her.

 _I can’t lose you too_  echoed through his brain at first, but the longer they kept him the more  _I can’t lose you too_  became  _I was being weak_.  _I need you_  became  _you’re an ass half the time_  and the way she looked at him that morning after Finn—open and trusting, like he was her anchor—faded away as he remembered how she looked at him at first: disgusted, like he was no better than the garbage he used to pick up. He forgot how her voice sounded when she said  _I can’t lose you_  and all he could remember was the blank look in her eyes when she spat that she was being  _weak_.

At first, the needles went in and he tried to pretend he was somewhere else. He tried to conjure up Clarke, brushing his hair out of his eyes and pressing her forehead against his, and when he was curled in the cramped cages he imagined what it would be like to fall asleep holding her. But hour after hour and day after day dragged on and those dreams seemed flimsy, the wishes of a boy who should have known better by now. He stopped dreaming, because it was pointless. She had sent him to die because  _it’s worth the risk._  She couldn’t even be bothered to name his sacrifice for what it was— _it’s_ , instead of  _his life._  He was an idiot to pretend like she ever cared—he was her shield, not her partner. He would take the blows meant for her until he shattered, and then she would toss him aside.

Clarke may have organized his rescue, but he didn’t owe her anything. She only came to see him once, after he’d been carried out of Mount Weather by men who would have been his brothers if he hadn’t brought Octavia to the dance, if he hadn’t cared. Bellamy was strapped to a bed because any time someone came near him with a needle he would snarl and buck, trying to fight his way free to something that never really existed. Clarke materialized by his side and brushed his hair off his forehead and he had never wanted her dead more than in that moment.

She didn’t know, of course, that her fingers in his hair felt exactly the way he imagined them. She didn’t know how badly he had ached for her touch, how much he had needed her love. She didn’t know that he had waited for her, caged and beaten and bled like an animal for the slaughter, until he knew she wasn’t coming. Clarke didn’t know how long he had believed in her, or how abruptly he realized he was a fool for thinking she would save him.

Clarke didn’t know that he wasn’t a person anymore. He had given her everything and now there was nothing left but fire and rage.

She didn’t come back after that day, not after the hate he hurled at her. Bellamy poured the venom of the past few weeks (no one would say how long it had been, just that it had been a long time because no one trusted him with the truth–that she had abandoned him) onto her and she took it silently. He blamed her for everything—for the plan, for Lincoln, and for his own failures, because he wouldn’t have done any of it if it wasn’t for her. She stood stoically but her eyes filled with tears and he hated her even more for that, because she gave up the right to care about him the day she sentenced him to die.

Octavia stopped coming too, after he spat that her boyfriend almost got him killed.  _Lincoln’s so sorry Bell,_  Octavia pleaded, but  _forgiveness_  and  _sorry_  were words that had no meaning to him anymore. He shouted at her until she left in a flurry of tears and braids, and Bellamy thought that being alone would be better.

It was worse.

They stopped tying him down after a week, on the condition that he take whatever medicine they delivered without throwing anything at the doctor. He agreed, but only because it meant he could move again. It had been so long since he could pace or punch or kick the wall that he agreed to behave, if only for the brief moments when a doctor and three guards would appear in his room, wary and requesting that he stay on the other side.

Raven showed up one day and took in the destruction that surrounded him. (He kept his word and stayed calm when the doctors arrived but mostly he tore things apart when he was alone. Mount Weather had caged him like an animal and that’s what he had become). “You done?” she asked calmly, like he was a person and not an inferno. Bellamy shrugged and Raven sighed. “I mean, are you done with this whole temper tantrum?”

Bellamy strode over to where she stood and towered over her, but she refused to back down. She refused to cower. She just narrowed her eyes at him. “You don’t know what it was like,” he growled.

“I don’t. But you didn’t have to watch your only family get murdered by one of your only friends either.” She crossed her arms. “I’m not afraid of you, you know.”

“You should be.”

“Yeah, well, tough.” Raven pushed her way past him and sat on the edge of his bed. “Why do you think this is her fault?” There was only one  _her_  when it came to him and Raven, after all.

“Because it is.” He clenched his fists and held himself back from punching the metal wall—the doctors were getting sick of stitching his hands at this point.

“Right. Because you weren’t planning on going to Mount Weather anyway, princess’s okay or no.”

“That’s not the point.”

“Oh yeah? Then what is? You pissed that she doesn’t love you? Is that it?”

“I don’t love her,” he lied. (He would always love her even if he hated her, because Bellamy couldn’t even choose who he loved).

Raven snorted at him and glared until he broke her gaze. “She saved you,” she said a little more gently than before.

“She sent me to die.” Bellamy’s hands unclenched and he sank onto the bed next to her.

“She did. And then the second she found out you were in danger we pretty much had to chain her to the Ark to keep her from storming Mount Weather herself.”

“She doesn’t love me.”

Raven rolled her eyes. “Not in the way you want, no. Not yet. But you can’t keep punishing her for that.”

“I’m not.”

“You are,” she countered. “You’re punishing her because you’re scared and you’re pissed, but you should know that you’ll never be able to punish her as much as she’s punishing herself.” Raven pushed off the cot and made her way to the door. “Word is that they’re gonna let you out as soon as you stop this little Reaper show, so get your shit together, Blake.”

Bellamy spent the next three days fighting down his monster. He didn’t throw a single tray, and when Jackson asked if they could draw his blood to see if his cell counts had rebounded Bellamy submitted meekly. He clenched his jaw and flared his nostrils but eventually it was over, and the next morning Jackson told him he was free to go.

 _Free to go_. It had been so long since Bellamy was free, but now he didn’t know what to do with it. Octavia wouldn’t see him and he wasn’t sure he was ready to see her, Lincoln’s betrayal still gnawing away at the edges of his mind. He stepped out of the Ark and into the open for the first time in weeks. There was an edge of cold to the air, and a sharp, smoky tang he recognized meant autumn. People scurried around him, heedless of the miracle happening, heedless that Bellamy Blake was a free man. He inhaled deeply and exhaled slowly, savoring the taste of freedom.

A flash of blonde caught his eye and there was Clarke, staring at him from halfway across the camp. Her shoulders were tense as she watched him and Bellamy  _wanted_  to hate her. Hating her was easier than loving her, especially when loving her meant offering yourself as a sacrifice. Loving Clarke meant he would never be able to fully choose his own way because he would always be looking to her, always be thinking of her and what she needed. Bellamy clenched his fists and met her gaze as the hustle and bustle of hundreds of people melted away.

Her lips quivered and then there it was, that start of a smile he had spent hours (maybe days, possibly weeks) imagining. Hesitant and careful, but pure and hopeful. He nodded slowly at her and let his fists loosen as he headed off towards his tent.

In the end, surrender was a choice. 

 

 He would choose it every time.

**Author's Note:**

> Title is from Hozier’s Arsonist’s Lullaby.


End file.
